Blood and glory

For all its shambolic effervescence, the formation of the Anti Nazi League was a critical moment in the battle against racism and the National Front. Thirty years after the riots of Southall and Lewisham, Ed Vulliamy [Observer] looks back on the intoxicating mix of 'bravery, pride and shame' which helped drive fascists from our streets

Vote for Enoch Powell,' came the counsel from a stage in the West Midlands. 'Stop Britain from becoming a black colony ... Get the foreigners out ... I used to be into dope, now I'm into racism. It's much heavier, man.' Not some ranting nutcase from the National Front, but an inebriated Eric Clapton (now CBE), formerly of Cream and latterly of Hello! magazine. Yes, Clapton - who played the blues, but whose outburst in August 1976 came hot on the heels of another from David Bowie, proclaiming Adolf Hitler to be 'the first rock star' and urging that what Britain needed was a 'right-wing dictatorship'.

People may feel grateful to Bowie and Clapton for their own reasons, but perhaps the most gratifying contribution this duo made to music was to detonate the revulsion at their sentiments and clear the stage for Rock Against Racism, the first edition of whose fanzine, Temporary Hoarding, appeared on May Day 30 years ago. 'We want rebel music,' it proclaimed. 'Crisis Music. Now Music. Music that knows who the real enemy is. Rock Against Racism.'

The publication emerged for an event at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, London, but quickly spread through the streets and along sweaty corridors of pubs and clubs throughout the land. And - part-wittingly and partly because of its time - it energised a political movement. Best described as the 'Anti-Racist Movement', this was among the most cogent mass endeavours in post-war Britain, for all its shambolic effervescence. It is a big claim to stake, but it changed things.

Within months of that first Temporary Hoarding, the ratchet would turn and the temperature rise on both sides of an already raging street war. The National Front would gain 120,000 votes at local elections across London and running battles at NF rallies around the country would culminate in one of the most bellicose riots the capital has ever seen, at Lewisham in August 1977, marking the first use of police riot gear on mainland Britain, and the NF's heaviest defeat on the streets. By the end of the year, the umbrella group had been formed which would harness these energies against racism and fascism and leave its symbol, the arrow, forever indented on the epoch: the Anti Nazi League.

I was no more than a minnow in this ocean, but my own baptism into the anti-fascist movement had been one of fire, as a student in Italy in 1973, when street fighting between the far left and neo-fascists in Rome, Florence and Milan heralded the bloody 'years of lead' - bombs, assassination and state-sponsored terrorism. Back in Florence during 1974, my friends (compagni - comrades - I'd have precociously called them) were involved in shutting down the entire city - whose people, accordingly, took to the streets in fury - after a train which had just left town, the 'Italicus', was bombed by fascists en route to Bologna.

Britain never endured 'years of lead', but the political maelstrom in Italy, France and Germany impacted on the far left in this country, now confronted by an enemy which would force it to harden, mobilise and expand its reach: fascism - the old doctrine in a novel form and a new, poisonously catchy language for the dissemination of race hatred. There had been race riots in Notting Hill in 1958, and attempts to imitate the Ku Klux Klan during the Sixties. But in May 1974, the National Front - formed back in 1967 - fought its first cogent election campaign, winning 10 per cent of the vote in some areas of London on a virulently racist platform aimed at rapidly rising unemployment. This flexing of fascist muscle threw down a gauntlet to a number of groups that rarely encountered each other: a politicised student movement exercised by events in Chile, Portugal, Africa and Vietnam (meanwhile trying to support a miners' strike), militant trade unionism, and increasingly self-aware black youth, facing down the police and propelled by Bob Marley and events in South Africa.

The NF's electoral foray of 1974 led groups of student leftists and blacks to augment a small picket regularly mounted in opposition to the Front's meetings at Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, London. On 15 June, we duly boarded buses with the openly flamboyant but privately nervous intention of breaking up the NF rally. What followed was the first riot of the era to follow; a terrifying collision between our crowd and the police, and the death of one of our number, Kevin Gately, from a blow to the head.

From that day onwards, over three years, a scattering of local groups confronted the NF every time it showed its potato-face. Even the dreaming spires of Oxford looked down on student riots in those days - and yes, of course, there is something ridiculous about that, but not when the fracas is outside the town hall while the NF assembled within.

In the definitive history of the anti-racist movement, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, the sociologist Paul Gilroy reminds us that it was begun not by the red left but by blacks themselves, 'organising in defence of their lives and communities'. By the early Seventies, part of that resistance within the West Indian community had become action by black youth, primarily directed towards the police, reaching a zenith at the Notting Hill carnival during the heatwave summer of 1976, when we were treated to the extraordinary spectacle of police lines breaking and running from an assault by teenagers armed with stones. There was more than street violence going on here: the crowds on Portobello Road were chanting 'Soweto, Soweto'. To be out that night, on the streets where I had grown up, was both frightening and exhilarating; there was empowerment in the mayhem.

Everyone in Britain knew the famous line from Enoch Powell predicting 'rivers of blood' if immigration continued, but that belonged to another era, 1968. In April 1976, Powell made a further speech, to a wider audience, warning that Britain was 'still being eroded and hollowed out from within' by 'alien wedges'. It was fuel on the fire. In local elections that year the NF won 44,000 votes in Leicester and, with the National Party, claimed 38 per cent of the vote in Blackburn. Racism was overt. An NF leader, John Kingsley Read, was tried under the Race Relations Act for a speech in 1976 berating 'wogs and coons' and reacting to the death of a young Sikh: 'One down, one million to go.' Read was acquitted, advised by the judge: 'I wish you well.' But it was the performance by Eric Clapton that led to more visible reaction, and a letter to the music press from a photographer, Red Saunders, that contained the line: 'We want to organise a rank-and-file movement against the racist poison music. We urge support for Rock Against Racism.'

Although initially propelled by the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), RAR became an anti-racist movement in itself, a crazy-paving of action and events, but also a focused demonstration of how music and youth culture could activate and energise. The NF, meanwhile, met resistance with further success at local elections in 1977, and that summer came the battle royal.

Lewisham is carved on the heart of every British anti-fascist of that time, for it was the neighbourhood through which the Front intended to stage its 'Anti-Mugging March' on 13 August 1977, after a singularly vile police rounding up of black kids supposedly stealing wallets. But the NF's march was assailed and ultimately stopped by a counter-demonstration of some 10,000 anti-racists. It was quite a moment: the 'Honour Guard' of thugs brandishing Union Jacks, their besieged route denied and then reforged by an advanced guard of police officers acting as official stewards, swinging into New Cross Road, where the running street battles began. They had been planned by the anti-fascists with military attention to detail, the politicos in unusual synergy with trade unions, the area's black population and much of its white one. For the first time the anti-fascists were more terrifying than their quarry (with the police more terrifying than anyone) and one felt, as the political writer David Widgery said, 'brave, proud and ashamed at the same time', watching the standard bearers of the master race scurry for cover from flying wedges of people in corporation donkey jackets and a hail of rocks and stones.

Thus the anti-Nazi League was born. The SWP was the midwife, but the notion was to give life to something much broader and wider, across society, and the baby was accordingly blessed by the likes of Brian Clough and Terry Venables (though handing out ANL leaflets at Plymouth Argyle and Manchester City was not always fun). Religious leaders of all faiths jumped aboard, and even a few nervous politicians, so that the launch, in November, was held at the House of Commons. The ANL's arrow became an endlessly adaptable emblem, so everyone could be 'Against the Nazis', be it 'Skateboarders', 'Vegetarians' or even 'The Albert Against the Nazis', which I joined through a pub near Manchester University. If the SWP had wanted to 'control' this organism, it may as well have tried to catch the wind.

A week after Lewisham I moved to Devon, and a job on a local paper made bearable only by helping establish a branch of the ANL from Exeter westwards, heeding not so much a 'headquarters' in London as the real core of the anti-racist reactor, in Birmingham: Searchlight magazine. Established in February 1975 by Maurice Ludmer, Searchlight was both an intelligence service and rallying call for the movement. Through its tenacious journalism we came to know the NF almost personally, their every move monitored, along with those of the satellite groups, such as the League of St George and British Movement, and the NF's connection to the supposedly respectable domain of the Conservative Party - The Monday Club.

There was always a coach from Devon - and later Manchester and Liverpool - for the next fray, for the next 'paintout' of racist graffiti, or the next RAR beanfeast, be it the heaving carnivals at Bethnal Green, Cardiff and Manchester or the grotty little venues in between. For all the endless meetings and often fruitless marches, there was also the Clash, Steel Pulse, Tom Robinson and arguments between those who thought Sid Vicious's swastika T-shirt was a laugh, and those of us who did not. The NF, remember, enjoyed punk and soul music, too.

Then came the general election campaign of 1979, and Southall. There was uneasiness on the bus - word that the ANL and local Asian groups had found it hard to agree on quite how to handle a National Front rally at the town hall of an Asian community; some had wanted sit-down protests, others wanted to stop the meeting from happening at all. The demonstration had been called for 5pm on Monday 23 April, but people hung around all day, picking fights with the police and getting picked on, until the police riot began around dusk. There was no feeling of bravery, pride or shame after Southall. Only fear, crushed and trapped on Uxbridge Road while the Special Patrol Group went wild, along with rage at the sight of the NF being driven to their meeting, through the crowd, sharing buses with police officers, and then depression the next day, when one first heard the name Blair Peach, a teacher beaten to death by the police, five years after Kevin Gately. Just as they had 'lost' Lewisham, the NF (and the police) had 'won' Southall. But quite suddenly, and a little surprisingly, the efficacy of those five years came to light.

The 1979 election, days after Southall, was disastrous for the NF, polling an average of 630 votes per candidate - less than 1 per cent. On the streets at least, the NF all but disappeared. There is debate about why its vote collapsed. Certainly there was fragmentation within the camp, but crucially, much of the NF's rhetoric on immigration had been adopted and repackaged by the emergent force and resounding victor at the polls, Margaret Thatcher, picking at the bones of a failed Labour Party so that the disaffected Labour vote that had drifted to the Front now swung behind the Conservatives. In part, though, the NF's demise was due to the endeavours of the voices that speak on these pages, and - even more so - to all those others who rocked against racism in their own way.

But where did it all go? Why, if it was victorious, did the ANL need to relaunch itself in 1992 and why does the BNP harvest with relative success and virtually unchallenged? Presumably the answer is the same as why one can now wander a university campus without seeing the word 'Iraq' or 'Darfur' anywhere, just as 15 years ago, genocide in Bosnia and Rwanda might as well have been on Neptune and Pluto. Three decades are a long time in politics, and WB Yeats was right when he wrote that 'the ceremony of innocence is drowned' when 'the best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity'. For all the stone-throwing and experience, that movement was a 'ceremony of innocence', and these voices, rather than drown, should speak to us now just as urgently as they did 30 years ago.

League positions: Who did what?

Paul Holborow
Co-founder of the Anti Nazi League, he was also an SWP organiser. He is now a lecturer at Southwark College

In August 1977 the National Front announced an 'anti-mugging' march through Lewisham. This was an area with a large black population, where some police operated a policy known among officers as PNH - 'Police Nigger Hunt'. So you can imagine how the people felt.

I was working as a full-time organiser for the Socialist Workers Party at the time and we decided that the National Front had to be opposed and so we organised a counter-demonstration. The idea was to physically block them from marching.

I can still recall the day clearly. As the National Front swung around the corner preceded by 30 police horses, Union Jacks, all the panoply and the swagger, one lone young guy in a very loud jacket and boots stepped out of the crowd, picked up a very large stone and threw it into the middle of them, in a way that encapsulated the whole day. In the end the NF were obstructed by about 10,000 demonstrators. It was a very exhilarating afternoon.

In the days after, the phone never stopped ringing. People were saying, 'I don't agree with the politics of the SWP, but I do want to stop the fascists.' So we decided to form a broader organisation with one single aim: stopping the Nazis. We called it the Anti Nazi League.

It was important that the ANL didn't just consist of the hard left, so we got together people who represented different strands of the movement. I approached Peter Hain, who'd just joined Labour from the Young Liberals, because of his part in organising the Stop the Springboks tour.

The whole point of the ANL was to build as broad a coalition as possible. Our aim was to win the soft racists away from the Nazis. The ANL and Rock Against Racism hooked on to punk and made it the language of the anti-racists.

I think the threat from the BNP today is as serious as that of the NF in the Seventies. They have made some sort of headway in the past two or three years, I'm sorry to say. I think the reasons are similar - many white working-class people feel abandoned. For every crowded classroom, low-paid job or high rent, there is an unacceptable but superficially plausible argument that immigrants are to blame.

Peter Hain
Co-founder of the Anti Nazi League, he is now Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and Wales

Labour was a bit reluctant to take the fight on at a local level. People said, 'Let the NF speak and then denounce them.' Well, when the racists were killing people on the street, you can't hang around for that kind of thing. So I agreed to work with the ANL.

People accused the Anti Nazi League of being a front for the SWP, but the thing got so big it wasn't a front for anybody. Couldn't be. We all got things done very quickly because the movement was based around action rather than ideology. This was a time when the NF was becoming fashionable. Punks and skinheads were wearing Nazi regalia. But the Anti Nazi League turned that on its head.

Why were the NF beaten in 1979? A mixture of reasons. I think Margaret Thatcher garnered some of the NF vote with her swamping speech ['People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture']. But I also think we demoralised and splintered the far right. A couple of years later I sued the NF's Martin Webster for libel - and he admitted in court the Anti Nazi League campaign had basically stuffed them. He'd never said that before. I knew it was true, but it was nice to hear it.

And the far right now? The BNP is different, but it's serious. They have more electoral success than the NF had, they have more potency than they've had for a while. But the BNP don't have the street presence the NF had then.

Maeve Landman
A school teacher who demonstrated at Lewisham, she now lectures in Sociology at Bristol

My two children were young, so I left them with my parents. It's funny what you remember - but I made sure I'd washed my youngest son's teddy bear because I thought, if I was going to be arrested , at least I wouldn't be leaving my children with a rank teddy bear!

When I got to the centre of Lewisham, all hell was breaking loose. I was cut off from my husband and my brother and friends. It was so frightening. And the police were really abusive. One said to me, 'If I wasn't in this uniform, I'd show you, nigger.' I'd come over to Britain from South Africa, so I'd experienced racism at its most naked and raw. But I was numb. It sounds very trite now, but the Anti Nazi League was part of a greater struggle for equality. Those were our finest moments, with fantastic comrades - that's what I remember.

Celia Stubbs
The girlfriend of Blair Peach, an ANL member who was killed demonstrating against the NF at Southall in 1979, she was a social worker and is now retired

Blair and I had been a couple for eight years, but I'd known him since he was at school in New Zealand. He was a very compassionate man. I was in Southall on the day he was killed. Blair had gone to the demonstration ahead of me because I was working. I came later with friends.

We never joined up - police cordoned off the town - so I didn't see what happened to him. I'd been on a lot of ANL demos. But Southall was different. People were very angry. There was such a mass of police, many of them on horseback, and we were totally boxed in. They chased us through Southall Park. It was very frightening.

When I got back to Hackney where we were living I got a phone call from the hospital. They said Blair was in a bad condition and I should come immediately. When I got there, he was dead. There were 10,000 people at his funeral, it was incredibly emotional. It emerged quickly that he'd been killed not by the National Front but by the Special Patrol Group. The inquest verdict was death by misadventure, but I believe that it wasn't a misadventure. There were 13 eyewitnesses who'd seen a policeman strike Blair.

Later it was discovered that all the police officers' uniforms had been sent to the dry cleaner's straight after Southall - so investigators weren't able to gather any forensic evidence. And at the ID parades all the chief suspects had grown beards.

Tom Robinson
Musician

The Tom Robinson Band was utterly unknown when I fi rst heard about Rock Against Racism. I wrote to the PO box number in the Melody Maker and said, 'I'm not anybody but count me in.' The organisers were putting on grassroots gigs at that time, where black acts and white acts would play together and, as a point of general principle, the reggae act would always headline.

They made little kits that they sent out to people who wanted to put on a gig, explaining how to put it on and promote it, where to put the posters. And they made the point that you should always pay the artists. These were professional musicians and you should treat them as such - workers getting paid for their work. It gave you a feeling of respect and having been taken seriously.

Observer